Summer is nearly here, vaccine mandates are lifted, and people want to travel–or do they?
The COVID pandemic created an unprecedented crisis for the tourism industry. Now that the pandemic is (hopefully) ending, transparency in post-Covid tourism policies can help bring visitors back.
Akriti is a graduate student at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy. Her interests include Canadian financial markets, formulating economic and financial policy frameworks that promote financial market stability, reducing systemic risk, and facilitating financial innovation.
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CRISES ARE NOT NEW to the tourism industry, but the impact of COVID-19 has been more severe than previous industry crises, at least economically. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the COVID border closures severely curtailed visitation across the globe with a 74% reduction in international arrivals, thus making 2020 the worst year in tourism history. New challenges have arisen about how the tourism sector will adapt and recover from the crisis, as well as how travel and tourism will evolve as a socio-economic activity. Finding answers and solutions to these problems is becoming an increasingly difficult task for tourism stakeholders, but transparency in tourism policies can help address it.
The challenge with COVID was twofold. First, countless businesses experienced challenges staying afloat, and many were forced to shut down, either temporarily or permanently. On a global scale, this jeopardized millions of jobs, billions of dollars, and a significant part of GDP. Of these, the tourism sector was particularly impacted by these shutdowns, particularly the lodging and food services sectors. An estimated 62 million tourism jobs were lost in globally in 2020. Alongside the overarching businesses shutdowns, travellers began weighing the potential costs and benefits of travel as a reflection of their increased focus on health and safety. Even now as COVID eases, this renewed consciousness around germ spreading remains for many of us.
It is the responsibility of tourism stakeholders to re-establish lost trust, as future travel will be based on travellers’ understandings of the industry’s ability to keep them safe, which must begin with transparency. Of course, government, the business sector, and service providers must work together to consider what customers need and desire right now, but then they must be transparent about how those needs and desires are not compromising the safety of tourists.
This approach to tourism policy is transformative, and will thus need innovative thinking, and transparency. To sustain a vibrant and profitable Canadian tourism industry there is need for a cooperative data sharing between stakeholders. Transparency is essential between the private, public, and plural sectors. Policymakers need to be transparent with citizens about the problems being faced and how they intend to approach them. Stakeholders, whether at the policymaking level or at the policy implementation level, need to have access to related data so that they can make informed decisions.
With today’s ever-complex technologies, it is in fact difficult to avoid transparency and if travellers feel unsafe about visiting a particular location, they likely won’t hesitate to find an alternative destination. Transparency about tourism policy will help speed up the adjustment process, however, this transparency must be intentional and effectively communicated to travellers. Not only should the travel industry be more transparent about their post-COVID recovery efforts, but this also serves as an opportunity for them to increase transparency related to their climate targets, sustainability strategies, socioeconomic impacts, and so on.
Although adopting radical transparency across the tourism sector could appear daunting for the industry, it is necessary and also has its own set of rewards in terms of regaining confidence. Before COVID, this was already happening in some places. The Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (STAN), for example, has invested heavily in its data and analytics stack over the last decade, providing tourism players with visitor arrival statistics, passenger profiling, spending data, revenue data, and detailed customer-experience surveys.
Consumer tastes for digital services are evolving, and tourism businesses will need to adapt to this as well. Many tourism small and medium enterprises in Canada, have not been able to completely incorporate new digital capabilities in the same manner that larger enterprises have, due to hurdles such as language barriers and an overall lack of digital literacy. Addressing these and other challenges necessitates a holistic, forward-thinking approach to policy development and execution. Governments want new research, data, and techniques that are tailored to the rapidly evolving tourism industry, and the tourism industry must be able to meet this demand.
Transparency needs to be extensively developed at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. There is a need to develop long-term programmes that maximise tourism's economic and social benefits while minimising its negative environmental repercussions because tourism is a major economic engine. It strengthens communities, improves our understanding of one another, and encourages the human-to-human connections that bind us as a nation and as global citizens.
The Bell is edited by Jaclyn Victor, Jason Kreutz, Shweta Menon and Phaedra de Saint-Rome of the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.